Where I've been for 2.5 years

Hey there! I’d like to reintroduce myself, I’m Krystal and welcome to my blog! I am now 28 and still living in the West Chester area with my boyfriend and fur babies (we’ve added another kitty, Callie, to the family since my last post J). I’m totally still obsessed with binge watching TV shows and keeping my positivity up when I can.

Writing has been such a huge part of my life since high school. It was my creative outlet until college where I felt put in a box without being able to speak my truth through each key stroke. So it seemed I needed a purpose for every perfectly structured sentence and I found that I couldn’t perform creatively under those circumstances. I needed an unrefined and unrestricted flow and this is where I found myself.

At first, I started blogging to share my wellness journey that I didn’t even realize at the time was the beginning. I wanted to challenge myself to stop drinking Coke and I did it. I shared how drinking more water and no soda started changing my life, again, without realizing that’s what was happening.

Once the challenge was over, it felt like my journey *at the time* was over too. So I shifted the narrative to makeup, because of the rise of my interest with YouTube and beauty bloggers. I jumped in without a care and never stuck to a routine in posting because I never felt confident enough in myself to continuously create meaningful content. How meaningful is a smokey eye anyways?

My love for makeup has not died and I have a love hate relationship with water, but I am still finding my way in this blogging world. I was actually surprised I was still getting hits on here after a hiatus of about 2.5 years of posting!

I turned to Instagram to share this wellness journey again, starting with weight loss. I used the Bio Cleanse from Plexus, stepped up my water intake, and used my Fitbit to get my step count up.

In the matter of months I was drinking half my weight in water, went from 200 steps daily to 6k, and I dropped 40lbs. It felt incredible that my pants were loose but my depression only got worse. To my surprise, losing weight didn’t make me happier, it didn’t help with my stress and anxiety, and it sure as fuck didn’t keep my positivity soaring when I wanted nothing more than to lay in bed with a pack of double stuffed oreos while crying to season 3 episodes of Grey’s Anatomy.

So instead of focusing this wellness journey on losing weight to make me superficially happy, I started asking myself the hard question of why I wasn’t happy in the first place. I couldn’t answer this question until I was on Lexapro. Now, I will say in hindsight, I did not take my doctor seriously when he told me it was a temporary drug, but I’m very grateful I only needed it for 2 months. In this time it allowed me to Marie Kondo my brain; what and who in my life is stunting my joy?

I’ll share more of the cleansing part later on, but for now, I learned my stressors, my triggers, and who I needed to let go of to further my personal growth in life. I learned I should have been showering myself with the love I so freely gave to those around me. I learned I needed to share my truth with those around me instead of putting up walls or a facade that I was doing better than I was in reality. And lastly I learned that toxic relationships were draining me faster than Instagram and Snap drain my phone battery on a Saturday, if you feel me.

Then one morning in January of this year, after a cheat meal, I felt like complete shit. Historically, whenever I would eat certain foods I would get an upset stomach that would radiate to back pain which I chalked up to indigestion or food poisoning. Until this one morning, I would drink peppermint tea to ease the pain and it worked. Unbeknownst to me, I was dealing with gallbladder issues going undiagnosed and untreated for 5 years. Long story short, I was in the hospital for about a week and had my gallbladder removed.

This happening was a serious wake up call. It had me thinking of all the times I believed there was nothing wrong with me and my body was suffering for years. The same with my happiness was happening to me physically, and that was a hard pill to swallow. Surgery set my physical progress back and I was angry at myself for it. Learning to love and accept myself while feeling like a failure has been a constant battle. But with positivity and support from the caring people in my life, I’m still learning to bounce back every day. 

That brings me to now! I am constantly working on myself, mind, body, and love. And honestly, I came back here to try out this blog again because the character count on Instagram was killing me. So we will see how this goes, but I am hoping that I can use this as more of an outlet for the thoughts racing in my mind. We’ll see J